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the Catholic emphasis on the individual judgment of the pope and the Protestant emphasis on the individual judgment of the believer.⁷ Russian Orthodoxy bound the Church and the state much more closely than was the case in the West. It was the original organic union, in Khomyakov’s view, a freedom-in-unity and a unity-in-freedom.

      The whole theme of transcending opposites is both a Kantian and Hegelian inheritance. Lossky (1951) explains: “Many Russian philosophers in dealing with the essential problems of world interpretation like to have recourse to antinomies; i.e., like to express the truth by means of two mutually contradictory judgements, and then seek ways of reconciling the contradiction” (190). This Hegelian streak in Russian philosophy made a deep impact on both Slavophiles and Westenizers, and even on those thinkers who turned to materialism and positivism (134).

      Ivan Kireevsky followed in this dialectical tradition. He was among the first of the Slavophiles to trace the “intimate internal relations in the world” (Lossky 1951, 21). Kireevsky rejected Western dualism and its inherent fragmentation of spirit, science, state, society, and family. He strove “for wholeness of the internal and external mode of life” (24).

      But in celebrating the holistic worldview of Eastern Orthodoxy and Russian culture, Kireevsky did not reject the Western Hegelian and Aristotelian traditions. Surprisingly, whereas some critics have derided Hegelian dialectics as a violation of the Aristotelian law of contradiction, Kireevsky argued that the genuine Aristotelian spirit “reappeared with Hegel.” Kireevsky saw Aristotle’s basic views as identical with Hegel’s. Hegel’s system was “as Aristotle himself would have constructed, if he had been born in our time.” Especially in his celebration of reason as the “sole arbiter of truth,” and in his emphasis on the relational and logical connections between concepts, Hegel had, in Kireevsky’s view, carried on the Aristotelian project.⁸

      Following the Hegelian model, Kireevsky departed from the one-sidedness of the Slavophile tradition. The typical Slavophile appealed to the Russian national character and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, arguing that Russian culture must avoid the influence of the Western secular enlightenment. The Westernizers, by contrast, advocated that Russia assimilate European science and commit itself to secular reason. Kireevsky aimed for integral knowledge, a wholeness in the human spirit, a synthesis of the two worldviews and a transcendence of the gap between reason and faith. Isolated from each other, the Slavophile and the Westernizer presented incomplete perspectives. For Kireevsky, unity was of prime importance.

      Such unity was also expressed in Kireevsky’s elaboration of Khomyakov’s concept of sobornost’, a doctrine accepted in varying forms by most Russian philosophers. Lossky (1951) explained that sobornost’ involved “the combination of freedom and unity of many persons on the basis of their common love for the same absolute values” (41). In Kireevsky’s view, “The wholeness of society, combined with the personal independence and the individual diversity of the citizens, is possible only on the condition of a free subordination of separate persons to absolute values and in their free creativeness founded on love of the whole, love of the Church, love of their nation and State, and so on” (Lossky 1951, 26).

      The struggle against dualism and fragmentation is manifested in the ontological and ethical theories of other Russian philosophers in the nineteenth century, such as Nicholas N. Strakhov, Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, and Nicholas F. Fedorov.⁹ Like Kireevsky, the Slavophile Strakhov viewed the world as a “harmonious organic whole.” His book, The World as a Whole conceptualizes the parts as constituents of the totality, even as the totality constitutes the parts. The parts submit to one another; they “serve each other, informing one whole” with “man” at the center (Lossky 1951, 72).

      Rejecting the mysticism and altruism of the Slavophiles, Chernyshevsky embraced a materialist, atheistic, and democratic socialist world view that greatly influenced Lenin. He valued the Hegelian dialectical method and proposed an organic union of spiritual and material dimensions (Shein 1973, 223). His ethics is a form of psychological egoism, where each person always acts selfishly. In his novel What is to be done? Chernyshevsky’s main character, Lopuhov, states: “I am not a man to make sacrifices. And indeed there are no such things. One acts in the way that one finds most pleasant.”¹⁰ But for Chernyshevsky, each person’s happiness and self-interest coincides with the common good, and hence, there is no conflict between the individual and society. His ethical ideal approaches a secularized sobornost’.

      Fedorov utilized the Hegelian category of “relatedness” in his conception of mankind as a constituted whole. He criticized Western positivism for its “separation of theoretical and practical reason” (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, 30). Like Chernyshevsky, however, Fedorov attempted to eliminate the distinction between egoism and altruism. Whereas egoists live only for themselves, and altruists only for others, Fedorov argued that this was a false dichotomy. He envisioned a moral world in which each individual lived with and for others.

      THE IMPACT OF VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV

      Vladimir Solovyov was the first and most original of Russia’s systematic philosophers. Like Leibniz, he exhibited a genius for absorbing and synthesizing the contributions of many varied thinkers and traditions (Zenkovsky 1953, 484–85). From Hegel, Solovyov learned to use a formal dialectical method. He was also influenced by the mystic Slavophiles, as well as by Fichte, Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. Having received his doctorate from St. Petersburg University, Solovyov proceeded to develop an organic synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science. His impact was widespread; he influenced nearly every Russian thinker who succeeded him, including Trubetskoy, Frank, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and Lossky. Each of these thinkers elaborated on Solovyov’s doctrine of intellectual intuition.

      In 1874, Solovyov wrote The Crisis of Western Philosophy. He criticized positivism and the empiricist-rationalist dichotomy. Empiricists, according to Solovyov, have embraced a form of sensualism that reduces everything to simple and subjective sense-experience. In the end, empiricism dissolves into subjectivism. So, too, positivism excludes metaphysics and “cuts itself off from reality.” Rationalism, by contrast, identifies being with pure thought (Copleston 1986, 220). Thus each tradition fails to grasp the integrated nature of real being. Frederick Copleston argues that, in Solovyov’s view, “we cannot understand reality without sense-experience, and we cannot understand it without ideas or concepts and the rational discernment of relations. What is needed is a synthesis of complementary truths, of distinct principles” (213).

      Lossky (1951) grasped that this Solovyovian synthesis was at root, profoundly Hegelian:

      The final results of empiricism and of rationalism are somewhat similar: empiricism leaves us with nothing but appearances, without an object of which they are appearances and without a subject to whom they appear; rationalism ends with pure thought; i.e., [quoting Solovyov:] “thought without a thinker and without anything to think of.” Neither in experience nor in thought does man transcend his subjective relation to the object and become aware of the object as an existent, that is, as something which is more than his sensation or his thought. Neither experience nor thought can, then, lead to truth, since truth means that which is—i.e., existence. [Quoting Solovyov:] “But only the whole exists. Truth, then, is the whole [emphasis added]. And if truth be the whole, then that which is not the whole—i.e., every particular thing, being or event taken separately from the whole—is not truth, because in its separateness it does not even exist: it exists with all and in all. Truth then is all in its unity or as one.” (96)

      Solovyov’s synthesis of experience and reason, empiricism and rationalism, echoes Hegel’s dictum, “The True is the whole” as expressed in The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977, 11). For Solovyov, as for Hegel, no particular thing can be grasped if it is cut off from the totality, which gives it meaning. And yet Solovyov rejected Hegel’s metaphysics for its one-sided rationalism.¹¹ Solovyov argued that by dichotomizing experience and reason, practice and theory, Western philosophy embraces alternatives that are equally one-sided and partial. Both experience and reason are essential to the comprehension of objective reality. Experience provides the sensory data for knowledge, as reason apprehends relations. But in uniting experience and reason, Solovyov embraced a third means of knowledge,

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